Gigabyte G1.Sniper 2: Military-Style Gaming LGA1155 Mainboard. Page 3

Gigabyte G1.Sniper 2 mainboard is based on the latest and most functionally rich chipset for LGA1155 platform available today – Intel Z68 Express. The distinguishing feature of this product is its unique design, rich accessories set, and extensive functionality delivered by the chipset and the latest developments from Creative Technology and Bigfoot Networks.

BIOS Setup

Unlike many other mainboards that started using UEFI, Gigabyte implements the so-called Hybrid EFI technology. The idea behind this technology is that they continue using the good old time-tested AWARD-based BIOS, where only the support of 3+ TB hard disk drives is implemented via EFI. However, let’s start from the main screen and work our way deep into all the interesting pages of the BIOS Setup step-by-step. I have to stress that currently only Gigabyte mainboards will display the actual frequency of the overclocked processor, while all other mainboards will always show its nominal clock, no matter in which mode it is actually working.

Just in case I would like to remind you that you can get full access to all parameters of the Gigabyte mainboard BIOS only by pressing Ctrl-F1 in the main BIOS window.

It is very convenient that “MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.)” is the first item on the menu list. This section contains all parameters related to overclocking and system performance fine-tuning. The start-up page of this section only shows you the list of available sub-sections and reports basic system info:

Then we see a purely informational sub-section called “M.I.T. Current Status” that displays the current system settings. Here we can notice some inaccuracy: when Intel Turbo Boost is on, the processor clock multiplier will increase at least to 34x.

The “Advanced Frequency Settings” sub-section allows adjusting frequencies and multipliers. You will also be able to track all settings changes by looking at the informational parameters and their values.

All settings related to processor technologies are gathered on a separate page called “Advanced CPU Core Features”. It was pretty strange to see that all power-saving technologies were disabled by default. It will most likely have a serious effect not only on the mainboard power consumption in idle mode, but also on the performance, because Intel Turbo Boost will be only partially functional.